A few stories have come up over the past week related to health and ecosystem services. First, a studyblows common-knowledge about the occurrence of American Cutanous Leishmaniasis (ACL) in forest environments out of the water. The authors examined patterns of the disease throughout Costa Rica, and related disease prevalence with socio-economic and biophysical factors. Surprisingly, their index of social marginalisation based on data such as income, literacy, level of education, distance to health center, correlated most with diseases prevalence. And the word on the street that less forest means less disease? Blown out the water - the relationship didn’t seem to exist, although a complex interaction with ENSO was shown to impact, whereby highly deforested areas suffered more from the effect of El Niño and in turn had higher levels of disease prevalence.
A second story did a fairly impressive mapping of emerging infectious diseases across the globe. They conclude greater prevalence in wildlife areas, though Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog overlaid the data with livestock atlases and found little agreement. This is definitely a paper that merits further analysis to further understand the drivers, but the fact that the map now exists is very encouraging.
And finally, I’m sure they are talking about all these issues in Ireland this week, where the 2nd International Conference on Health and Biodiversity is going on. Thanks Luigi.
Citations:
Chaves LF, Cohen JM, Pascual M, Wilson ML (2008) Social Exclusion Modifies Climate and Deforestation Impacts on a Vector-Borne Disease. PLoS Negl Trop Dis 2(2): e176. doi:10.1371/journal.pntd.0000176.
Kate E. Jones, Nikkita G. Patel, Marc A. Levy, Adam Storeygard, Deborah Balk, John L. Gittleman & Peter Daszak. Nature 451, 990-993 (21 February 2008); doi:10.1038/nature06536.
thanks
hello
im, soooo bored